Did you want to setup a video conference call but wasn’t sure which software the other party is using?

I can tell you exactly how long it will take you to setup everything so you can chat using video online with any person. 63 minutes!

That’s how long it took me on the phone (My call duration was 1:03:22) to a friend in another state just to start the video chat, download and setup skype, install the new driver for your cam because it didn’t support MAC computers, setup your mic (Her mic was muted the entire time!) setup your speakers source… ETC.

Sounds familiar?

What if I told you that on June 13th of 2009 while I was waiting patiently to snag my Facebook username (facebook.com/GuruOfSales) Pete Cashmore of Mashable.com along with 2 friends of his (one of which was actually in facebook’s HQ for the event) were all doing a video chat room on mashable, and you know how long it took them to set it up? 22 seconds! Not because they all had their cams already setup, not because they all knew how to use skype, but simply they created the chat room using the service that I heard of that night: TinyChat

At TinyChat.com all you need is just a twitter account, name your room, login to twitter and you have a high quality video audio and text chat, it took me 22 seconds to setup the entire room, didn’t even have to promote it, people just jumped in, how did they know? A tweet and a facebook status update was sent instantly to my friends and followers with the link to the room, even more, I had the option of tweeting every chat line I enter, which I think is a neat feature.

However, the coolness doesn’t stop there, many readers of this blog will love the next option: Screencast your desktop, NICE! With one click you can record or live stream (screencast) your desktop or website tuturial in a very high video quality, but for this option you will have to pay for the pro membership, and you will not believe this, it’s only $14.95 to get pro, Holly Cow! An entire $14.95 (Just being sarcastic), a screen cast or recording software like Camtasia will cost you $100’s of dollars, mean while this cool service will do almost the same job with the addition of live casting chat voice and text, I mean… come on, my Flickr pro Cost the double of that!

History is being made as I am writing this.
As the first African American president, Barack Obama The United Sates Elect-President (At the time of writing this) with high expectations for the nation and the world for that matter.
CNN has partnered with Facebook to stream live the entire event, not only that, but also sharing your opinion though your facebook status update which live streamed right next to the video stream.

You can also catch the inauguration on Hulu or Joost live streaming by clicking on each image below:

or

If you’re not following me on Twitter yet, do so by going here.
And if you are not an RSS subscriber yet, do so by going here.

As I was going through my wave of messages, I received this message from the Facebook Platform team (As a developer):

We wanted to take a moment and thank you for all of your great work and amazing applications that have helped make Facebook Platform the largest and fastest-growing social platform over the past year and a half. As we end 2008 there are over 660,000 of you worldwide building applications that give users more powerful ways to share and connect, and collectively your applications have reached nearly 140 million people.

Just recently, we’ve been excited to bring you Facebook Connect – allowing you to integrate the tools and features of Facebook Platform on your Websites, devices and desktop applications. In the next several months, we’re looking forward to introducing additional improvements to help users more easily find your applications as well as launching the first sets of Verified Applications to users. If you haven’t applied for verification yet, apply here:(Link shown only for developers!)Over the next year, we look forward to continued developments to improve Facebook Platform and help you reach and engage more users, and grow and sustain your business. We would love your feedback and input on what you think is most important – please take a few minutes and answer our survey here:

(Link only shown to developers!)

From all of us at Facebook, we wish you and your families “Happy Holidays,” and we look forward to making the web even more social with you in 2009!

I have been to a couple of the Facebook developers garage day and have 3 videos of the live streaming event via skype, here is the first of 3 videos:

Thank you Facebook for a wonderful 1.5 years and thank you everyone who
is reading for a great 4 years run on this blog and others, huge
holiday wishes from me to everyone, enjoy and be safe.

Follow what I am doing during the holidays on Twitter, Friend me on Facebook, get the RSS of this blog, and comment below if you want to reach out to anyone 🙂

You have less than 24 hours left to secure the special launch discount on the Become A Blogger Premium Membership:

Click on this banner to get access:

At 6pm EST sharp, Thursday, December 11, the generous discount for the
Become A Blogger Premium program will be taken away, and the price
increased to $47 per month – almost double for what you can still get
it for right now.

This is not a joke, and I have a promise from Yaro and Gideon that
they will definitely increase the price immediately after 6pm EST,
December 11.

Yaro Starak is at it again, sharing his wealth of information about blogging from A to Z, this time he’s got Gideon Shalwick sharing the creation of their new product release The Roadmap to become a Bloggeror for short they called it The Roadmap.

I have met Yaro a couple of months ago in New York and scored a video interview with him ( I consider my self very lucky for that). And I can tell you that whatever comes from Yaro in regards of blogging, I consider it gold.

Yaro and Gideon both came up with the report and the idea of the premium training program, but after reading the report throughly, I am impressed with the value of the information in it.

At almost 60,000 views of their videos as I am writing this, credibility is speaking out (or should I say screaming out at 60,000 volts!) and there is nothing more I can say about that.

But wait, when you download the free report and read it, here are the main 3 things you will learn about:

The 5 essential milestones for a successful blog

What the “X-Factor” for successful blogging is and why you’ll fail without it

How to use social media to boost traffic to your blog

My Favorite part as a native blogger myself, was the “X-Factor” I mean really, I learned something new from it.

After spending hours watching YouTube Live! on Saturday night, and only 48 hours after it was over, I am still browsing some interesting videos and all the sudden I notice 2 things on YouTube:

1. YouTube announce it’s sponsored videos:

YouTube is promoting the Google chrome browser in pretty much every page lately, but just last night I started noticing the new announcement, the YouTube sponsored videos, in other words, AdWords the YouTube way, or Facebook ads, or a new PPC service or you name it..
Which is an extremely smart solution by Google of course.
What’s better than the user paying YouTube to promote their video that’s hosted on… YouTube!
Not only they profit from this program but also the end page will contain “ads by Google” and there is a big chance it would have another AdWords from within the video.
Google made their investment back in no time when they acquired YouTube.
Don’t get me wrong, I am loving the new sponsored program to the fullest, for a minimum budget of $5 a day and as low as 10 cents per click on the video promoted from YouTube’s homepage, this is like a marketer dream come true. And it’s organized, unlike what eBay had for years with their homepage featured upgrade option, which was not calculated and cost way much more for a tiny chance of actually being on the homepage.

Plus, (and like I always said) free is good, free and sponsored is even better, that’s how the big guys been doing it forever, offer a good free service and support it with ads!

That’s how I am doing my Online training school, it is for free, other trainers charges an arm and a leg for membership with a very poor content to provide, on the other hand, lot’s of big companies and friends wondered why would I give out a high value information to people without charging for it? My answer is 3 reasons:

a. Not everything is about money.
b. I love sharing!
c. I am not stupid, I got sponsors (big ones) 😉

And now, my 4th reason is: Just look on what YouTube did and think about 2 things: Great free service, and even greater profit returned!

More about the new starting date (12/15/08) and why will be in a post soon 🙂

2. YouTube now in true widescreen HD:

And I love this one, now I can upload true HD 16:9 videos straight from my camera (the Sony dsc-t500) without having to worry about resizing the video to a 4:3 ratio.

I showed a little on the video above, but there is way much more into having a true widescreen on YouTube, specially that most screens (TV’s, Desktop’s and Laptops) are being manufactured this way nowadays.

I’ll go through more details (the technical stuff) soon once I study the new option thoroughly.

First of all, I would like to apologize about the big mistake I did while taking this video, and to clarify why, is simply because I snatched this interview as soon as I got the chance, however, my camera was on very low battery and it was set in the previous recording on the zoomed in position, if I have realized that and tried to zoom out before taking the video, I would loose the power and the entire interview in general.
I know it might seem funny, but everyone make mistakes!

In the interview, John Donahoe, eBay’s current president (Who also used to be the eBay marketplaces president for a long time), speaks positively with confident about eBay, urging new users to sign up, buy and sell, even create social networks around it.
I first met John last year at eBay’s DevCon in Boston, briefly spoke to him about his visions and found out that he is not only a brilliant & open minded person, but I thought that he is the man for the job, taking eBay to the next level (In my opinion, this should have been done a long time ago!) and I agree with every move he made since taking over his position 100% (And yes I don’t think that eBay should be just a big garage sale, there is a lot more into it than just that).
John, me and Pierre Omidyar (eBay founder) share the same vision that drove a lot of current sellers away or mad or whatever you have seen in the news latley, but I think that consentrating on eBay’s core business, opening more doors to developers (API’s), and cleaning up the site in general of some of the old rules that brought the company somehow down, is the only way for eBay to become what it’s meant to be since the begining, an online marketplace!
Yes I understand that I might get a lot of comments against my opinion, but I truly believe that if you reialze how much more money you can make though eBay without even selling anything, you will be amaized of what you didn’t know before. All I can ask you is to open your eyes, think outside the box, research on how to become a real player in this game (Not just a big seller) and I guarentee you great profit and bigger bussines than you can even imagin.
Before I leave you with the video, I wanted you all to know that I am including at least 2 months total of eBay training, not only on how to sell, but also a complete work around to make profit in other ways but selling, including the affiliate program, API calls, integration into other applications and similler stuff. (Don’t start going crazy now, I promise that it will be so easy for any one to do it with the least experiance) and will be all for free on the upcoming Online School that I announced here.

As I continue sharing all the interviews that I did throughout the summer, today I am sharing an interview with an author of many books and DVD’s Marsha Collier.A list of all the books and DVD’s that Marsha wrote or co-wrote is in the widget below:

Yes it is my turn to be interviewed, as you can tell from my YouTube channel, I interviewed almost everyone else, and I am proud to announce that my first public video interview (About my business) was made by (non other than) Yaro Starak himself, the same person that brought to you the always resourceful blog: http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/Yaro interviewed me in New York when I insisted on meeting him (As one of his loyal fans) and the video just went live last night (Again perfect timing).

Here is the video:

I know I looked nervous in the video 😉 but the good thing is that when Yaro tagged the video on YouTube, he tagged it with keywords like (Ice Cream) which just happened to be one of my recent tags on my new personal video blogging serious on YouTube as well, called: Alex’s Random.anias! so the videos actually relate on YouTube immediatly. Just perfect timing.

Speaking of videos and tagging, I am revealing a bit more about the Online training school to all of you right now: Yes I will include sessions about video blogging, tagging, and even some tips to have all your YouTube videos to be available in high quality.